The Sundance award-winning “Winter’s Bone” is one of those local-color indies. Spoiler alert: The only colors offered are exhaust-pipe gray and roadkill brown.

We’re in the Missouri Ozarks, where the line between interior and exterior furniture is fluid, every lawn doubles as a decommissioned vehicle storage facility, and squirrels get nervous around suppertime.

A tough 17-year-old girl named Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is raising her two little sibs. Her silent, possibly brain-damaged mother sits in a vacant haze while her father, a small-time drug dealer, has jumped bail. He left the family shack as security, meaning if Ree doesn’t find him, she and her family will be homeless.

This low-voltage affair is resistant to the dictates of mystery — Ree simply wanders around haphazardly instead of matching one clue to another. In the first half, everyone is hostile (“That’s a real good way to end up bit by hogs, or wishin’ you was”), while in the second, people turn helpful.

The few showdown moments, meant to have a backwoods authenticity, are tangy but false, like canned moonshine. Why would the yokelocracy bother to beat up Ree? She poses no threat. They could simply ignore her (instead of first pummeling her, then inexplicably volunteering their assistance).

The grisly climax — I won’t give it away, but let’s just say that you won’t want to have any Junior Mints in your mouth when hillbillies and chain saws join forces — is almost preposterously worked up for maximum Gothic value. If there were a white-trash rights group, it would picket the movie studio.

My knowledge of the Ozarks is limited, but I was chilled by the smeary atmosphere — the junkyard desperation — of an economy based on critter stew and meth labs. The dialogue, while prone to reach for plaid-shirt poetry (“Talkin’ just causes witnesses, and he don’t want for any o’ those”), at least is memorable. “You best keep your ass real close to the willows” means, apparently, don’t vamp it up too much, girl.

Yet the main reason for “Winter’s Bone” to exist is that it delivers a little voyeuristic thrill — a bit of poverty porno — for the critics who awarded it their highest honors at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. There ain’t nothin’ they like better’n a nice bowl o’ grit.